David Foster Wallace on Life and Work

"Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vividand important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty much the same for all of us, deep down....

...'Learning how to think' really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult, life, you will be totally hosed...

...And I submit that this is what the real, no-bull-value of your liberal-arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life, dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and your natural default-setting being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out...

...But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the starts-- compassion , love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only think that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship...

...It is about simple awareness-- awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: 'This is water, this is water....'

...It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out."

Excerpts from a commencement speech delivered in 2005.
Printed in the Wall Street Journal Sept 2008, after the author's apparent suicide.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178211966454607.html